Galerie Claude Lemand

Halida BOUGHRIET, Memory in Oblivion, 2010-2011. Original pho­tograph.

Presentation by Emilie Goudal.

 Born in 1980 in Lens (France), grad­u­ated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris - training which she con­sol­i­dated with a New York expe­ri­ence at the School of Visual Arts, Cinema sec­tion -, Halida Boughriet is an artist of quo­ta­tions, part of a richly ref­er­enced genealogy of Western art his­tory. She decon­structs and diverts social vio­lence and visual assign­ment, in a per­for­ma­tive action of (re)def­i­ni­tion with and against the image; an approach of which the female coun­ter­part of the Memory in Oblivion series (2010-2011) is one of the most sen­si­tive illus­tra­tions.

 The arti­fi­cial and twi­light gynoe­cium of Memory in Oblivion is an obvious ref­er­ence to the Women of Algiers immor­tal­ized by Delacroix, and more broadly to the odal­isques of Orientalist painting and pho­tog­raphy.

“These pho­tographs, explains the artist, are part of a series of por­traits of widows who suf­fered the vio­lence of the war in Algeria. These women, whose por­traits rep­re­sent a col­lec­tive memory, are the last wit­nesses. However, when we talk about the war in Algeria, we never think of these women, because nei­ther the offi­cial his­tory nor the pop­ular imag­i­na­tion of the war includes them or very little. (…) This series has con­tributed to rein­te­grating them as an impor­tant part of his­tory, it is now an archive. Moreover, I trans­formed them into a pho­to­graphic sub­ject, reclaiming the sur­face of the image. »

These elderly women, shown in the con­fine­ment of a domestic inte­rior, whose memo­rial knowl­edge is mate­ri­al­ized by the light haloing the con­tours of their faces, here seem to be waiting to be ani­mated, before time forever locks up a word that has remained in the antechamber of his­tory.